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Predator Diversity Changes the World: From Gene to Ecosystem

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Biodiversity in Aquatic Systems and Environments

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Biology ((BRIEFSBIOL))

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Abstract

Trophic polymorphism, defined as the state in which two or more clearly different feeding functional traits exist within the same population of a species, is general in fishes. In aquatic ecosystems, the fishes often have strong impacts on prey communities as keystone predators, so that phenotypic divergence of their feeding traits can alter biotic and abiotic attributes of environments through changes in the form of trophic interactions. The predator-induced environmental alterations may, in turn, drive evolutionary changes in adaptive traits of themselves as well as of other members in the communities. This process, in which ecology and evolution reciprocally interplay over contemporary time-scales, is termed “eco-evolutionary feedback.” In this chapter, we review how and when trophic polymorphism has been generated in fish populations and then discuss what consequences it has in ecological and evolutionary aspect. Special references are made to the case in the ancient Lake Biwa, which has a geological history long enough for divergent fish populations to come to ecological speciation and thus provides a good opportunity to understand how such an evolutionary process diversifies biological communities and consequently ecosystem properties in lakes.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Post and Palkovacs (2009) recommended restricting the use of the term “niche construction” to the process by which organisms shape environments in order to separate it from the process by which biologically constructed environments shape selection regimes for the evolution of organismal traits.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Dr. T. Kokita for his comments on our manuscript. We also thank R. Kakioka and Y. Sakai for providing their unpublished data. This manuscript was under the support of the Global COE Program (06) from the MEXT, Japan, and The Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (D-1102 and S-9) of the Ministry of the Environment, Japan, and the JSPS Grant-in Aid (No.20370009 and No.23657019).

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Okuda, N., Watanabe, K., Fukumori, K., Nakano, Si., Nakazawa, T. (2014). Predator Diversity Changes the World: From Gene to Ecosystem. In: Biodiversity in Aquatic Systems and Environments. SpringerBriefs in Biology. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-54150-9_2

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